The World Within Your Mind

IS THE WORLD YOU SEE REAL, or is it just an illusion in your mind? By way of your five senses, your awareness of self presents to you a perception of a world outside of You. This world is so convincing that you firmly believe it is real. You don’t even have to think about it. You just blindly accept that it exists.

You can see, feel, hear, smell and taste the world around you. The world is everywhere. But what if everything you’re perceiving is only a fabrication, an elaborate dream coming from inside of you and then projected outside as what you believe is reality? Sounds ridiculous but…

This is not something new, it is a philosophical theory called Solipsism that has been debated for and against by many great thinkers. Solipsism asserts that ‘nothing exists but the individual’s consciousness’. In other words, your consciousness alone exists. Everything else, including your body is an illusion.

At first it seems quite a harebrained idea, for it completely denies the existence of the world around you. Except when you put your mind to it, it really is impossible to verify anything but your own consciousness that seems to be centred somewhere behind your eyeballs.

The You that is reading this, the awareness in your head that is also observing and interacting with everything around you is the only thing you can ever be sure of. After all, you’ve been intimately involved with ‘you‘ and all that’s ‘outsideof you’ all your life.

Whether Solipsism has any credibility or not is impossible to say. We probably can never know whilst living this physical lifetime, but think about it… Which parts of existence… of the world outside of You… can you ever be sure of? None! Each one of us can only be sure of our own thoughts.

We are here to learn the truth. The point about theories like this is not to blindly believe or disbelieve them, but to quietly and impartially observe them. Be open to the fact that the way you accept yourself and your world as being reality may be far different than what you presently think it is…

Dan’s Quote: “When you die you will become aware that life as you knew it before_____________death was just a dream, and this new place is where you dreamt it.”

The inspiration for this post came from: ‘The Learning Mind’.Header: A camel train on Cable Beach, ‘Broome’, Western Australia.